Rendering Wounds in Left 4 Dead 2

Alex Vlachos, Valve March 9, 2010

Outline
Goals Technical Constraints Initial Prototype Final Solution

Left 4 Dead 1 Wounds

Built-in 5 variations only Requires texture support Always Fatal

The Pitch
Gray Horsfield lives for destruction
(Gray is a Visual Effects Artist at Valve, previously at Weta)

Goals
Accurate location of wounds Wounds match weapon strength
Remove limbs, torso, head, half of body

Separate wound geometry & textures Several active/visible wounds per model
Shipped up to 2 active wounds

Technical Constraints
Already at memory limits on the Xbox 360 Didnt want heavy CPU setup Ideally wanted a GPU solution No additional base meshes except for wound geometry
Better for artists to author Share wound models among many infected

Common Infected Variation

Simplest infected has over 24,000 variations

We didnt want to add another variable to this

Things We Didnt/Couldnt Do
Model variations of each infected with all combinations of 1 and 2 wounds Use different index buffers to cull polygons not friendly with LOD and low quality wound silhouettes

Auto-generate new polygonal meshes with holes cut for wound models Author different body parts/sections with different wound variations

Initial Prototype
Use pose-space ellipsoids to cull pixels Fill hole with wound model

Culling Inside an Ellipsoid

Vertex Shader calculates relative distance Interpolate this value and clip / texkill

Benefits
No additional vertex buffer data Still only one draw call for full model Wounds are a separate draw call with their own textures:

Problems
Hard cut looked unnatural Wound models looked strange because they required a lip around the wound border

Lacked blood on the clothes and skin near the border of the wound
Required an exact geometric fit with the model

Projected Texture Experiment

Try using a projected texture and use alpha to kill pixels

Abdominal Wounds

Projected texture will affect his back So lets combine the texture and ellipsoid

Blood Layer
The texture projection is aligned with an axis of the ellipse We multiply the blood layer by a gradient to prevent the blood from spraying too far

Vertex Shader Code

// Subtract off ellipsoid center float3 vLocalPosition = ( vPreSkinnedPosition.xyz - vEllipsoidCenter.xyz ); // Apply rotation and ellipsoid scale. Ellipsoid basis is the orthonormal basis // of the ellipsoid divided by the per-axis ellipsoid size. float3 vEllipsoidPosition; vEllipsoidPosition.x = dot( vEllipsoidSide.xyz, vLocalPosition.xyz ); vEllipsoidPosition.y = dot( vEllipsoidUp.xyz, vLocalPosition.xyz ); vEllipsoidPosition.z = dot( vEllipsoidForward.xyz, vLocalPosition.xyz ); // Use the length of the position in ellipsoid space as input to texkill/clip float fTexkillInput = length( vEllipsoidPosition.xyz );

// We use the xy of the position in ellipsoid space as the texture uv float2 vTextureCoords = vEllipsoidPosition.xy;

Other
Depth-only and shadow render passes
You dont want phantom shadows

Hi-Z performance issues Wound models are attached to base skeleton of infected model

Multiple Wounds
We limited the final solution to 2 active wounds

Upper & Lower Back

Groin

Arms & Legs

Abdomen

Head Wounds

Half Body

Axe & Sword Slashes

Upper Body

Stats
Up to 54 unique wounds per model Each wound is only 13% of the memory cost of the old system in Left 4 Dead 1 Vertex shader costs 15 instructions
Fill-bound, so rendering perf impacted minimally

Pixel Shader costs 7 instructions

Summary
Wound models separate from base mesh Use pose-space ellipsoids for outer limiting cull volume Use projected texture for rough edges and blood layer

Additional details about our rendering:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications.html

Thank you!

Alex Vlachos, Valve alex@valvesoftware.com